Rossmoor News, Wednesday, September 30, 2026, page 21A

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• And Then the ‘Sparkle’ Faded into Contra Costa Lore
• What Matters Most is Mattering

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Rossmoor News • September 30, 2026 21A

COLUMNS ARE STRICTLY THE OPINIONS OF THE WRITERS AND NOT THOSE OF

ROSSMOOR WALNUT CREEK, THE ROSSMOOR NEWS OR ANY CLUB. COLUMNS & OPINIONS

And Then the ‘Sparkle’ Faded

into Contra Costa Lore H

alf a century ago, when I was a young news reporter, I was doing research at the Pleasant Hill Library when an old map stopped me. There, among familiar names from Central Contra Costa County, was one I had never heard before: Sparkle.

“What in the world was Sparkle?” I asked myself. I don’t remember what story brought me there. Reporters chase hundreds of stories, and most little side discoveries quickly disappear from memory.

But somehow that delightful name – Sparkle – stayed with me.

More than 50 years had passed, but recently I found myself musing about it again. So, I went looking.

Sparkle was real. We can prove that. An early 20th century Sacramento Northern Railway employee timetable lists Sparkle as an operating point near present-day Pleasant Hill. Another identifies it as a spur. But don’t imagine a town.

There was no Sparkle City Hall, Main Street or post office, apparently just little more than a railroad sign and freight loading spur.

The Sacramento Northern was a remarkable California electric interurban railroad between Oakland and Chico. Its cars rolled through a Central Contra Costa landscape we’d scarcely recognize today – orchards, fields and scattered farmhouses.

And that brings us to the irresistible question: Why Sparkle? Here we cross from history into folklore that says the track curved there, and contact between

By Tom Debley

Tales From Memory Lane

the trolley and overhead electrical wire sometimes sent blue-white sparks flying.

So, imagine a dark Contra Costa night. An electric train approaches through the orchards, its headlamp glowing brighter. As it rounds the curve, sparks dance overhead. And perhaps, people who gathered the history say, the best guess is somebody at Sacramento Northern decided to call the spur Sparkle and put it on the map.

No one has located a document establishing the name’s origin, though maps list Sparkle. The sparks, then, are lore.

Lore presents a fascinating problem for anyone rummaging through the past. There is reality we can establish with timetables, photographs and newspapers. Then there is another kind of “reality” surviving in someone’s mind – remembered, interpreted and sometimes embellished as one teller passes it to another.

Sparkle contains both. The more I dug, the more that peaceful orchard landscape I had imagined began to change.

Nearby were the pear and walnut operations of Philip Bancroft, son of California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. During the Great Depression, California was convulsed by struggles over wages, unions and economic power.

In 1934, longshoremen struck Pacific Coast ports. Police killed two men on San Francisco’s “Bloody Thursday.” A general strike followed, largely shutting down Oakland as well as San Francisco. Meanwhile, Contra Costa agricultural wages had fallen to about 17½ cents an hour. Workers demanded more. Growers resisted. Unionists picketed roads and orchards.

The growers organized, too. Seventy-five were deputized during one confrontation said to have been at Sparkle, and in some accounts implying it involved Bancroft’s pears. So those peaceful-looking orchards around Sparkle weren’t always peaceful.

And here Sparkle accounts again slip back into lore, raising a question about Bancroft’s role, since his pears were associated with the Sparkle spur and

the labor clash in stories. But researchers found Bancroft apparently didn’t own the land where Sparkle stood. His operation had another Sacramento Northern spur farther to the northeast.

Plus, a photograph taken at Sparkle during pear-harvest season in August 1952 shows refrigerated railroad cars on the siding. But were they Bancroft pears? Or, with no identification on the cars or in the newspaper caption, did someone later just assume Bancroft was involved in the 1934 confrontation?

So, again, here are two stories of Sparkle: the one we can document and the one people “remember” and pass along.

Eventually, the Sacramento Northern stopped running. The wires came down. Orchards disappeared beneath houses, roads and offices. But transportation didn’t abandon the corridor. BART arrived in 1973, running on the basic path of the abandoned rail line between the present-day Pleasant Hill and Concord stations.

So, the next time you board a BART train at Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre, stop for a moment. You are standing very near where Sparkle once was. In your mind, erase the freeway. Take away BART, the buildings and subdivisions. Put back the orchards and open fields. Let night fall.

Now listen. An electric interurban approaches through the darkness. Its headlamp appears. The wheels grow louder. And perhaps – just perhaps – blue-white sparks dance overhead as it rounds the curve. Or is that just a fable someone left us?

Some places live on maps. Others live in people’s minds. And some, like Sparkle, manage to live in both.

If you’re interested in California’s electric railways, the Western Railway Museum in Solano County holds vintage Sacramento Northern cars and equipment. It also runs heritage train rides on original SNR tracks.

Tom Debley can be emailed at debleytom@gmail. com

What Matters Most is

Mattering T

his summer, I wrote about the importance of having more meaningful conversations and suggested four questions to stimulate that result: What moment changed your life? What do you understand now that you didn’t understand at 40? How would you like to be remembered? What turned out to matter most?

I thought those were questions primarily about looking back. Lately, however, several responses have caused me to wonder whether they may be pointing us forward.

Maybe figuring out what matters is only half the job. The other half is finding ways to still matter.

That may become an especially interesting question as we grow older.

For much of our lives, there were ready-made ways of telling ourselves that we mattered. Someone needed us at work. Children depended upon us. Deadlines awaited us. People called with problems that were somehow ours to solve. There were promotions to pursue, organizations to lead, bills to pay and places we were expected to be on Monday morning.

Then life changed. We retired. Our children built lives of their own. Someone else occupies our old office. The telephone may not ring quite as often with people asking for our judgment.

None of that means we matter less. But it may

By Bill Leary

Engaging Saging

mean that mattering is no longer assigned to us. We have to choose to matter.

I believe that is one of the great opportunities of this stage of life. We have something now that we could not possibly have possessed when we were 30 or 40: decades of experience. We have made good decisions and spectacularly bad ones. We have loved people and lost people. We have succeeded at things we once thought impossible, and failed at things we thought would be easy. We have changed our minds. We have survived disappointments that once seemed unbearable. Surely, all of that ought to be good for something.

I’m realizing that experience stored away is not necessarily wisdom. It becomes valuable when we do something with it.

That “something” need not be grand. We matter when we call someone who is lonely. We matter when we listen long enough for another person to tell us what is really troubling them. We matter when we help a younger person avoid a mistake we once made or, perhaps better, give them the freedom to make a mistake of their own.

We matter when we repair an old friendship, reconnect with someone we have lost along the way, welcome a new neighbor, volunteer for something worthwhile, speak up about something we believe needs changing, or simply make another person’s day a little easier.

Sometimes, mattering may consist mostly of letting someone else know that they matter.

There is an important distinction here. Mattering is not the same as being important. Most of us have probably known people who confused the two. Being important is about recognition. Mattering is about contribution.

Being important asks, “Do people know who I am?” Mattering asks, “Is something, or perhaps someone, better because I was here?” I find the second question more interesting.

There is a lovely paradox to growing older. At precisely the time when the world may seem to expect less from us, we may finally possess more of what the world actually needs from us: perspective, patience, experience, stories, judgment, and perhaps a little humility about how often we have been wrong. We also have a greater appreciation of the time that remains in our lives.

Which raises another question. What do we want to do with the time that remains?

There are people living right now who can be affected by whether we choose to engage with them or withdraw from them. There are problems in our community and our world to which we can still contribute. My grandson helps to remind me that there are younger generations who may benefit from something we have learned, and from our willingness to listen to what they have learned as well. There also are conversations we still need to have with aging loved ones, such as a sibling or old friend, while we still can.

The four questions I recently posed invite us to examine the lives we have lived. But perhaps the most important question comes next: What are we going to do with what we have learned?

Rossmoor has many opportunities for exercise and play, and that is fabulous. But it also has many clubs whose mission is to make a difference. And many residents who could use a little help.

We may have fewer years ahead of us than behind us, but that does not mean those years have to matter less. Perhaps the opposite is true.

After spending a lifetime discovering what matters, we finally have the opportunity, and perhaps even the responsibility, to do something about it.

Because in the end, maybe what matters most is mattering.

Bill Leary can be emailed at leary.bill@yahoo. com

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Photos on this page

• Tom Debley smiling wearing glasses and an open-collar shirt.
• Bill Leary smiling wearing a dark sweater and collared shirt.